What Concerns us

Rahel and Fenna grew up in an all-female household with their mother and her female partner. Now Rahel strives to reproduce the traditional family unit but she is haunted by an unsettling pregnancy, postnatal depression and compulsive breastfeeding, while having mixed feelings about her singing career. Meanwhile, Fenna wonders whether she consented to the intercourse with Luc which left her pregnant. What Concerns Us is a punchy contemporary read that scrutinises gender roles within our society, examining what it means to be a mother and the nature of femininity, as well as how to remain independent in a variety of different types of relationship.

«A beautiful examination of female interiority. Vogt is not afraid to ask difficult questions. In what ways does motherhood bring us to our limits? What are the consequences of believing a child doesn’t need a father?» Elizabeth McNeill — Chicago Review of Books

9781739751517
  • Novel (English)
  • Heloïse Press 2022
  • Paperback
  • 224 Seiten
  • Website

There is much in What Concerns Us that needs to be acknowledged more openly in social discourse, and Vogt’s frankness in writing about consent, post partum depression, misogyny and the complexity of relating to others against a backdrop of presenting a strong front to the world is a valuable contribution towards meeting that need. — Jan Hicks on «What I Think About When I Think About Reading»

Vogt does an exceptional job as a writer, along with Caroline Waight’s astute and perceptive translation, to lay bare the intricacies and complexities in understanding the difference and/or similarity between the duties of parenthood and privileges of masculinity. — Ipshita Mitra, «Feminism in India»

With this shift from «vagina» to «vulva» to a word still in gestation, the three women signal the shift Vogt makes in her novel as a whole: from gaps to bridges. Vogt’s goal is not destruction here, but recreation. Her goal is finding forms and words and narratives that unite, and that we create for ourselves. — Elizabeth McNeill, Chicago Review Of Books